The physical changes since the lake have been rather astronomical. I can almost see myself grow each and every day – not in some metaphorical sense but quite a literal one. The measurement stick that I have been compared to daily – which seems to be closer to a metric system than the Imperial system, judging how close the number marks are. Kind of hard to tell without some type of reference point – my body doesn’t really count since I don’t quite remember how big babies are supposed to be, which would be wrong anyway due to my growth.

I started off about halfway up this measuring stick when I was born – for all intents and purposes will be deemed as a meter until I am corrected – and in the week since then, I seem to have grown about ten percent height-wise. Measuring time seems to be easier now – since the blonde lady comes by to put me up against the measuring stick each day.

I think I have mastered leisure meditation at this point, so I move onto Awareness, the failure at the spiritual lake still fresh in my mind. Awareness is a mental cultivation technique, to improve my ability to use my senses. It cannot help me with my cultivation, but mastering it is required if I am to move onto Qi Awareness, which I do, in fact, need.

Mostly, I just use Awareness to hear the words the four adults in my life say – it feels like Awareness can slow down time, so when I listen to their words, each syllable is heard clearly and precisely. This is, in part, motivated by how much they want me to learn how to communicate and read, since they spend not an insignificant portion of my day reading me picture scrolls and more.

Finding time to meditate has been a bit more gingerly. Everyone seems to try to fill my waking hours with tasks. I try not to offend any of them, so I try to balance my time between them four of them when they want to read to me or play their silly games, which I do mostly to practice Awareness, if I’m being perfectly honest. These games might help me develop skills like object permanence, which I already know, and develop a bond, which I already am locked into. So I deeply meditate during a few of these instances, making sure that I don’t do it to the same person twice in a row. Gained a lot of cultivation time that way.

The best time to practice Awareness is when they read me picture scrolls. Each picture scroll employed a minimalistic take of art, few objects in each panel but detailed without overwhelming. One tree, some clouds, a man for one page. A dragon, the setting sun, the snow for another. Words were written in clear, blocky characters, a blessing for me to read. Some of the more fancy artworks displayed throughout the manor had characters that looked like misprinted blobs of ink. Utterly unreadable.

Despite its simplicity, enough is portrayed so I can guess what the story is. With Awareness amplifying my hearing to make each character more distinct and enhancing each character like magnifying class, I am slowly able to match the word to its sound and guess its meaning. It helps that all the readers point at each word they speak too. So considerate it’s like they are trying to teach me to read already. I would consider this a far reaching theory, if it were not for the fact that I’m growing so fast that I guess learning the language, especially when they take such great lengths to be repetitive, simple and direct, which made it so hard to not learn.

On the other hand, I have been checking my spiritual strength, which has been stuck at: 120, even though the size is now a quarter of its pre-lake size. My cultivation speed has dwindled since my visit, only because gathering liquid qi without support is much slower than otherwise. So a slow trek from there.

҉҉҉

After another two weeks, I finally learn the blonde’s lady name: Meng. She has sort of honorific or title attached to it, meimei, but I’m not quite sure what it means. Could mean martial sister or aunt, sister or aunt, friend and so many more. Perhaps she’s my grandma, who know with cultivators. I just stick to Aunt Meng. She’s basically mother number two at this point, given how much time she has spent with me – with the Ascetic, Yang I think, vying for a close third.

Our household does have servants – I have seen them deliver food and manage the rest of the house since the only Aunt Meng ever leaves the room for extended periods of time. The adults don’t even sleep either, for they are up when I wake up and still up when I sleep. The only exception is mother, who must have been recovering from giving birth to me and from me devouring her qi reserves. The bags underneath her eyes are gone, she’s less prone to frowning, crying and being sad. Not that she doesn’t anymore, but not as often. I hope my snuggles are helping, because I give her a lot.

I am now about one-and-a-half newborn mes now, height wise. Weight-wise, I have tripled since my newborn, which I now know because I can read numbers now. My stomach has grown as well, it does not seem that my frequent meals will be ending time soon. For while I no longer rely solely on breastmilk, and some qi droplet they have been feeding me alongside it, every few hours, my meals have been just as frequent. My growth seems to be acceptable, for I am now only confide to the herbal bath when I sleep, which still amounts to a large part of my day, but is less than before.

As for Accumulation, my soul reads 162. I spend most of time weaving threads as I strengthen my soul, as it is very rare that I run so low on qi that I begin to meditate, perhaps only once a day. I have gotten leisure meditation and Awareness to work together well enough so my qi reserves never dip because of Awareness. However, Qi Awareness still remains frustratingly difficult to understand. Oh well. I’m still busy with threading. I’ll get to it later.

҉҉҉

I might not be the most familiar with baby growth and the like, but I can comfortably say growing in this world is complete shenanigans. I’m three months old, something that none of the adults fail to remind me about. At about three feet tall, weigh now about twenty jin, which seems to be equal to about twenty pounds – I don’t think I weigh anywhere close to forty yet. Theoretically, I’m at the size where I should be walking around, which has been abysmally difficult. Hard to do so when my size changes each and every day, though my body does crawl well by itself, so I leave all that grunt work to it.

My real mistake happens about two weeks back, when I accidentally blurted out a few words Aunt Meng were about to read. Easily one of my worst mistakes. Now that I’m a communication god of maybe twenty words under my belt, playtime is over and the vocabulary homework begins. No longer reading picture scrolls to me, but scrolls filled with never ending text, with words they know are out of my reading level, since they use illusions to explain the words to me – nouns by showing the object and verbs by showing the action; adjectives are surprisingly difficult, so they stick with the concrete ones after a while, like color. Even then, I have no idea what they were trying to explain with a whole bunch of random objects appearing one after another.

On one hand, it’s great that I’m learning the language. On the other hand, I wish she would just leave me alone. It is very convenient that I can simply dump my troubles onto my physical self and simply cultivate whenever I’m done with the lessons.

I would like to say progress, but not sure I’m liking where my life is heading. I’m two months old and my family are already expecting me to be some literary genius. Not surprising for a xianxia, but they should at least temper their expectations for a baby after all. Only way I even get through all of this is thanks to Awareness, helping me hear each syllable clearly and helping me see an enlarged version of every word so I can actually differentiate the new words, some of which required ten plus strokes to write.

So everything is fine and dandy, except for one thing: they have yet to let me leave the room and my clothes have remained that hospital gown white. I am now big enough to wear them without any adjustments, but I’m past done with them. I’m not big enough to leave apparently? Not sure what the logic is, but the adults may as well be Divinities for all my ability to slip past them to go outside.

Yay. Back to training I go, I guess.